Magneto2.0 wrote: ↑May 28 23, 9:48 am
phins wrote: ↑May 28 23, 9:02 am
Magneto2.0 wrote: ↑May 28 23, 8:25 am
I always take these list with grain of salt, because nobody knows. I always look as Spencer Strider as a recent example.
Fangraphs had Strider as a 45+ FV prospect coming into 2022
Baseballprospectus in 2022 said Strider would be a bullpen arm because they said he had no secondary offerings
in 2022 Keith Law had Strider as the Braves 12th best prospect, and if he developed a secondary pitch and changed his arm slot he could POTENTIALLY be a league average starter
People writing these list do their best to project, but it's really really difficult to know. So never get too caught up in it.
Picking out outliers to form your viewpoint is probably not the best strategy.
No one knows the future with 100% certainty. Of course.
The case with Strider is he turned into a completely different player. Banking on that will be difficult.
The only thing you can do is evaluate in the here and now, use data to identify players who might be that tweak away from transforming, then hoping for positive variance.
He's an outlier on the extreme end, sure, but MLB is littered with players who were not highly touted prospects and are 3+ win players,. We have one on our team now (Edman). Hell, Goldy was considered a "meh" prospect too.
It's not that these people making the list are stupid or don't know what they're talking about, it's that projecting long term is damn near impossible. How will you ever know what players will make the proper adjustments? Develop skills sets like plate discipline or added velocity? You can't know. That's my only point. It's not to downplay the amount of research that goes into curating these lists, it's just to bring some perspective. I feel like sometimes we look at these list and just accept them as fact rather than conjecture.
Fair. On the whole, the lists are great. From a micro level, there are so many outcomes on the ledger it's going to have the pop-ups everywhere. You just can't predict them with any success, so you evaluate the tools and project an overall average range of development for each.
It's pretty clear to me, the Cardinals pitching philosophy is to grab as many of the athletic strike throwers they can. Then let variance and weighted ball training have a few explode into more.
There are a dozen prospects currently in the Cardinals' pitching pipeline that fit that mold.
Liberatore
Graceffo
McGreevy
Hjerpe
Connor Thomas
Ian Bedell
Brycen Mautz
Pete Hansen
Max Rajcic
Inohan Paniagua
Hancel Rincon
Cade Winquest
The hope is that with continued mechanical tweaks one or two of them will move into another tier of starting pitcher prospect. Either through velocity jumping at an unexpected rate, or through an angle change that allows the pitches to play up.
In reality, it's a smart strategy due to what you're talking about; we just don't know who will explode and have an uptick. The downside, of course, is that you don't get any lottery tickets to hit, you're left with a whole lot of AAAA starters with the stuff to get AA hitters out, but who stall out that level and you don't have anything missing bats at a level you need on a ML staff.
They've tried some of the high variance arm strength types and have almost completely whiffed in recent years, so I'm sure that has scared them some. The real hit has been Tink Hence, but they haven't even let him off the leash at all yet, which concerns me. What do they know there that we don't?
Austin Love is a bully with a huge frame who has impressed me and I hope he can improve his conditioning to a point where he improves his fastball command and smooth his mechanics.